


gentlemen place your bets

by odoridango



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Backstory, Betting, Canon Compliant, Card Games, Magic Tricks, Other, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-27
Updated: 2015-04-27
Packaged: 2018-03-26 00:43:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3830797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/odoridango/pseuds/odoridango
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Scouting Legion party turns serious when Eren plays with a little bit of magic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	gentlemen place your bets

**Author's Note:**

> For eruriren week, day 2: sports. Would definitely appreciate feedback on this one, since it's kind of a weird piece for me.

Eren smiles at them beatifically, with a hint of fang, and slaps his cards down on the table.

“I win,” he says sweetly.

“Fuck,” Levi mutters in distant shock, throwing his own cards down in disgust. “I can’t believe this.” He takes a swig of what Vine is left in his mug. There’s not a lot left. After all, Eren’s sitting there with just his jacket and uniform apron removed, the top half of his harness draped carefully over the back of his chair, and he’s grinning like a loon because the rest of them are down to a couple socks and, maybe the spare shirt or two, and their underwear. In the case of Gunther, no underwear at all, though bless his godforsaken exposed twig and berries he has no shame about his body and wears his skin proudly for all to see, even when he’s sitting next to Mike, who’s best described as a six foot plus boulder. Through the slight haze of alcohol, Levi thinks smugly to himself that he really does only pick the best for his squad. Mike seems to agree, he and Gunter quietly, but aggressively, flexing at each other, cheered on by a sloppy, much-too-drunk Gerger and a belligerent Rene, who remains upright only by the firm force of Nanaba’s arm wrapped around her waist. Nanaba’s a lightweight, still finishing their third mug of Vine slowly, watching bemusedly as Henning redresses himself in quiet shame, being the only one of their squad who hadn’t dropped out around the time pants had begun to come off. Petra and Auruo have been gone for hours, having ducked out to argue outside. They’re probably fucking somewhere. Erd has skipped off somewhere to court his love with drunken letters and inkblots. Levi only hopes that he won’t be the one to find and clean the next morning.

“How’d you do that,” Hanji says, speaks the words so loose that they slur together, barely recognizable. They don’t move, since Moblit is asleep on their shoulder, but their eyes looks like dinner plates, less manic and more amused in the tired, sly way they sometimes are. Erwin’s laugh is like a roll of thunder behind them. Being the Commander, he prefers to sit out on the games, though in truth he probably has more fun watching people participate than being a participant himself. Levi’s eyes narrow, sweep over disheveled blond hair, red-rimmed eyes, pale skin and flushed cheeks, slightly faltering hands. No, he hasn’t gone too far tonight, not yet, but it’s a close thing. Who knows how many times Erwin has refilled his cup.

Eren grins, buoyant on three mugs of Vine. He picks out a meager coin from his earnings, flourishing it before Hanji’s eyes until they grow cross-eyed. Then he flips it in the air and catches it with both hands, sliding his palms apart with a little shimmy of showman’s flair, to show that the coin is gone.

“It’s magic,” he purrs. Hanji’s jaw goes a little slack, and their little shriek and jolt wakes up Moblit, who whines sleepily at them to turn off the alarm. Erwin laughs again, claps a little facetiously, just to be the jackass he really is.

Levi expects Eren to pull the coin from Hanji’s ear, because he’s seen this before, done this before himself, a couple times. He wishes he were a little more surprised, but he’s not. Eren’s civilian record is spotless, because the one he had is buried in a town of corpses and rubble, and two to three years flying under the notice of the government is enough time for any amount of things to happen. Levi knows because he was Underground, already buried despite being alive. When Eren first joined, Levi had been ready for any of the idiosyncrasies, coping methods and traumas he’d seen in his life, and though Eren never gave sign of anything other than a fairly severe case of soldier’s shock, Levi was convinced that Eren knew something of the streets.

But Eren reaches towards him, pulls the coin from his ear, fingertips almost brushing the sensitive edges, looking at him with big, hungry eyes. Levi’s too tired and too drowned in Vine to want to even begin understanding that hunger and that hope, barely able to understand the sudden urge to bolt, but mostly it’s Erwin’s bulk sliding in close to his back and the burning, burning hand near the small of his back that anchors him, ties him down, cages him in and steadies him. He grits his teeth. He wants to fly.

He drinks. He drinks, and so he doesn’t see Erwin drink, barely sees the others leave, barely sees Eren settle back into his old chair. When Eren reaches for the bottle, hesitant, no one stops him. He’s in the Scouting Legion too. If the next expedition doesn’t kill him, the tribunal might.

“Parlor boy,” Levi says, once most of the partygoers have left for bed, or for linen closets. They’re all cleaning up their own messes tomorrow, especially Hanji and Moblit, who never made it out of the room, collapsed snoring on a hoarded pile of discarded clothing. Levi’s head lolls to the side as he blinks and refocuses his gaze on Eren in dulled epiphany. “That’s what you were.”

Eren hides his uneasiness with a quick swing of his mug. He searches Levi’s face, studies the set of his mouth and the minute crinkles of his eyes. Parlor boy is a very specific term, known by very specific people.

As if to convince him, Levi gropes unsteadily for a stray coin on the tables, flips it lightning quick across his knuckles when he finds one, back and forth, back and forth, three times, four times, until he flips it in the air, catches it in a fist. A shake of his hand, the spread of fingers and the coin is gone. Eren finally looks him in the eye.

“Legerdemain,” Erwin mutters, slumped heavily against Levi’s side.

“Excuse you,” Levi says. One more check, a quick sweep of the eye up and down. He scowls a little harder, remembering low candles, late nights, messy desks with letters of condolences the only neat things on them. The sour tang of alcohol, lingering in Erwin’s hair as Levi throws him onto bed, walks off ignoring his pleading eyes.

“Eren,” he prompts again. He doesn’t want Eren to smell like that.

“…yeah,” Eren admits. “I was a parlor boy. Front end only.”

Levi nods. “You deal the cards?”

“Dealt cards, dealt dice.” Eren grins, with his dark skin ruddy and reddened all over, bright at the high points of his cheeks and the tips of his ears, flush spreading down his collar. He looks healthier, like this. In his room, behind bars, he always looks pale; in the sun he looks washed out and thin. He finally looks like he ought to, healthy and strong. “Hardest to beat in the house.”

“Not bad. How’d you skip out in back?” Levi asks, watches Eren flinch and wither.

“The sisters were strict on front and back divisions, since a lot of them had families before going to the boarding house. Said us parlor kids made them think of their own brothers and sons,” Eren says. Rubbing his wrists nervously, he adds, with a hesitant glance at Erwin, “And I. Uh. I kept a sharp knife and wasn’t afraid to use it.”

“Good,” Levi says, and means it. “I only had the knife. I used it a lot.” Whether out of discomfort about the topic, or because the position of his ass on the bench is bothering him, Erwin shifts a little, hand tensing where it’s remained on Levi’s back. He might be tough Scouting Legion Commander now, but Erwin doesn’t really know about streetwalking, about gambling, about gangs and corrupt officials, the way Eren and Levi do. When Levi had been first fished out of the underbelly of Sina, he could hardly say a word to him about what he had done and seen, even in private.

“Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there,” he had snarled at Erwin in the early days, fists curled into that ugly, starched collar, glaring, glowering and blustering like he had something to prove.

To Eren’s credit, his reaction is subtle and minute, a quick widening of the eyes and a flattening of his mouth. His hands flex on his knees, and they’re steady hands, calloused and maybe a little stubby, with large palms and short, slightly curved fingers.

“…what about you sir?” he asks, grasping nervously for his mug. He frowns because Erwin’s got his grubby hands on it, already draining it dry like a man starved for water. “Sir,” Eren says, pouting, because he’s really quite mouthy when he’s not worried about protocol, “That’s my mug.”

“Stop that,” Levi growls, yanks the cup away from desperate hands, shoving back as Erwin strains for it.

“No,” the big lout grunts, “No, I need it—“

Eren plucks the cup out of Levi’s hand, downs the remains in a single long swallow, head thrown back, Adam’s apple bobbing. He comes back down with a sigh, wipes his mouth with the back of a hand.

“Drunken patrons were hard to deal with,” he says, and none of them give this boy enough credit, not at all. Erwin slumps against Levi, motionless, his gaze a thousand miles away. “Sometimes they tried to hurt the sisters. Or tried to hurt one of us, when the house won. They’d wake up and not know where they were.” He leans towards Erwin, hand reaching for his face. With a short flip of the wrist, suddenly there’s a playing card in his hand, the ace of spades.

“You,” Eren says, and even tipsy he’s charming, the only recruiter any branch of the military would ever need with his ruddy cheeks and impassioned stare, “You know where you are, right? That’s why you were here tonight. So don’t go there. Don’t go where the hurt is.”

“Less the ace, more the joker,” Erwin murmurs bitterly.

“Are you serious right now,” Levi says, dumps Erwin abruptly onto the wooden table. Erwin accepts this with the same put-upon apathy he accepts everything with when he’s at this level of drunk. “You don’t get to back off. We’ve all lumped in for this, we’ve all bled for this.” _I followed you for this_ , he doesn’t say.

“We’re fighting,” Eren says simply, “And we’re going to die.”

“Real helpful,” Levi snaps.

“It’s the truth,” Eren says, grabs Erwin’s hand, brings it up to his face to study. “We’re all going to die someday,” he says. “If you’re here, we won’t die so soon.” He drops the ace card in Erwin’s hand. “Isn’t it that easy?”

Erwin traces the edges of the card slowly, strokes with overly tender fingertips. “Easy,” he echoes quietly, like a moan. Easy to die. Easy to live.

“Which trick were you best at turning, sir?” Eren asks, gathering the cards and shuffling them in his steady, steady hands.

“The shell game,” Levi says. Three shells, one chance, watch closely, very closely, as they move, track the one with a stone in it. Move fast, quick, and clean, three chances, one stone, but for another variable, the human variable, the dealer.

The house always won.


End file.
